Kansas City, Mo. ? Trevor Bauer bounced a couple of pitches in the dirt, long before it became a soggy puddle of mud.

He threw a few wide. A couple high and tight.

Even when Bauer did find the strike zone, the Royals were just as powerless to hit him.

The young right-hander allowed only a long two-run homer by Lorenzo Cain while pitching into the seventh inning, and Brandon Moss hit a two-run shot of his own as the Cleveland Indians beat Kansas City, 6-2, on Thursday night in a game called early because of rain.

“Early on he had some struggles. He left a pitch over to Cain. After that, he was really good,” Indians manager Terry Francona said. “He really competes.”

Bauer (5-2) has allowed two runs or fewer in each of his last four starts, getting to the seventh in each of them. He walked four but also struck out five Thursday night.

“The trend is we’ve been facing good pitching,” said Royals manager Ned Yost, whose team has lost seven of nine. “That’s the trend.”

After struggling to score the previous night, the Indians pounded away against Chris Young (4-2) over the first five innings. They sent eight batters to the plate during a four-run third inning, and Moss added his second homer of the series with nobody out in the fifth.

“I wasn’t as sharp as I’d like to be. But when I made pitches, I felt like they fought it off and fouled it off and took some good ones,” Young said. “They were better than me tonight.”

The game was delayed with one out in the bottom of the eighth as lightning and heavy rain rolled into the area. The umpires waited 44 minutes before calling Cleveland’s sixth win in eight games.

Jason Kipnis, Michael Brantley and David Murphy also drove in runs for Cleveland.

The slumping Royals offense never got Bauer in a whole lot of trouble. They didn’t manage a hit until Omar Infante’s single leading off the third, and the only time they punctured the scoreboard came when Cain ripped a two-run shot 422 feet to straightaway center moments later.

Otherwise, the former first-round draft pick harnessed some erratic early stuff to flummox the Kansas City lineup. Bauer made Salvador Perez look foolish with a strikeout to end the second, then rung up Alcides Escobar to leave a runner stranded in the fourth.